A Lady of Good Family: A Novel - Softcover

A Garden for First Meetings

This is the most difficult type of garden to design, since who can tell when first meetings will occur? However, if you are inclined to plan for the unforeseen, to hope for limitless possibility, I recommend a garden that includes elements of the romantic, the antique, and the implausible.

The romantic element should include a series of intersecting winding paths, trails from which, at the beginning, one cannot see the ultimate destination but only guess at it. The gravel for these paths should be very fine and make only the slightest whisper of noise when walked upon.

The antique element should include a small folly or casino, a shelter of some sort in which those meeting for the first time can find objects to feed their conversation. First meetings often involve a certain amount of shyness, diffidence, and anxiety. It is therefore helpful if the garden provides distraction.

The implausible should include a plant growing out of place. I do not normally recommend such a thing. Plants, after all, know where they like to grow and do not like to grow. Roses do not like shade and ferns do not like direct sun. If, however, you can convince creeping speedwell to grow in one twist of the gravel path, this serves as a reminder to those meeting for the first time that life is full of uncertainty and unexpected happenings. Above all else, we must cherish the mystery.

For plants I recommend pines as a backdrop, especially Roman umbrella pines if your climate will allow them. If not, a very small grove of Black Forest pines or, even better, pines from the Odenwald area of Germany, planted thickly.

Flowers should include angel’s tears daffodils of the narcissus species. They are smaller than other varieties and require a more observant eye; Aquilegia vulgaris, or common columbine, which looks best grown in semishadowed areas; Chrysogonum virginianum, goldenstar, which will bloom all summer in case the first meeting should not occur quickly.

And roses, of course. There should be roses in all gardens, and in a garden for first meetings the rose should be Rosa gallica “Officinalis,” the old apothecary rose, also known as the rose of Lancaster. This rose, with its very dark green foliage, blooms just once in the season, reminding us that first meetings are not to be taken for granted. It will also spread of its own will, sending out shoots in all directions, and is a good plant for sharing.

ONE

1920
Lenox, Massachusetts

My grandparents had a farm outside of Schenectady, and every Sunday my father, who worked in town, would hitch the swaybacked mare to the buggy and take us out there. I would be left to play in the field as my father and grandfather sat on the porch and drank tea and Grandma cooked. My mother, always dressed a little too extravagantly, shelled the peas.

A yellow barn stood tall and broad against a cornflower blue sky. A row of red hollyhocks in front of the barn stretched to the sky, each flower on the stem as silky and round as the skirt on Thumbelina’s ball gown. In the field next to the barn, daisies danced in the breeze. My namesake flower.

I saw it still, the yellows and reds and blues glowing against my closed eyelids. The field was my first garden, and I was absolutely happy in it. We usually are, in the gardens of our childhood. I, who had lost so much, wondered if I could ever be truly happy again.

When I opened my eyes I was on a porch in Lenox, a little tired from weeks of travel, a little restless. My companions were restless, too, weary of trying to make polite conversation, as strangers do.

Mrs. Avery suggested we try the Ouija board. We had, before that, been discussing rose gardens, and the new hybrids, especially the Miriam yellow with its garish, varying hues.

“Roses should be red or pink,” Mr. Hardy complained.

“Or white,” added Mrs. Ballinger.

“I like the new hybrids,” I said. “Those bold colors.”

“Oh, dear,” said Mrs. Avery.

Guests at the old inn, we perched in a row of rockers, recovering from a too-heavy supper. There was me, just back from campaigning for the women’s vote in Tennessee; Mrs. Avery, the youngest of us all yet seeming the oldest, a rabbit of a woman who spoke too quietly; Mrs. Ballinger, as round as a pumpkin, with hair dyed the same color; and Mr. Hardy, a tall, gaunt man who stooped even when sitting.

It was a late-summer evening, too warm, with a disquieting breeze stirring the treetops as if a giant ghostly hand ruffled them. Through the open window a piano player was tinkling his way through Irving Berlin as young people danced and flirted. In the road that silvered past the inn, young men, those who had made it home from the war, drove up and down in their shiny black Model Ts.

It was a night for thinking of love and loss, first gardens, first kisses.

The moon was cloud covered, and the inn’s proprietor did not turn on the porch lights, since they drew mosquitoes and moths. We sat in darkness, except for the occasional small flare when someone lit a cigarette.

An uneasiness charged the air, the feeling that something was going to happen. It is an uncommon sensation in summer, when the world seems to have settled into its own idea of Eden. The wind had a premature autumnal feel to it. “You feel the seasons in a garden, the passage of time,” my friend Beatrix told me once. “Whether you want to or not.”

The hotel had a rose bed in front of the porch. I wondered whether the roses were the same variety as what had grown in the garden at Vevey, Switzerland, where I had first met Gilbert. Pink roses all look alike to me. Perhaps that’s what Gilbert thought of me that evening at Vevey when we met. One pretty American girl looks much like all her sisters.

In a way, all hotels look alike, too. Some are grander than others, some have the Alps for scenery, some a little town in Massachusetts. I was staying, as my finances required, in one of the less grand inns of the town, but I was always aware that in those Berkshire hills nestled some of the most famous houses ever built, cottages where Melville and Hawthorne had resided, and later, after Lenox became fashionable with the wealthy, the larger estates where Vanderbilts and Morgans, and the writer Edith Wharton, had passed summer days.

I was content to be in an inn, where strangers come and go and you feel a bustle of life about you, what Mr. Henry James described as the rustling of flounces and late-night dance music, the cries and sighs as young people court and play.

Fashionable young girls did not wear muslin flounces anymore. Those were as out of style as calling cards.

We had, that night, already finished a game of bridge, and I had fleeced the others of their pocket money. I was usually popular with my peers, but not with their children. They found me a very expensive proposition, a bad influence. That from grown children who danced the black bottom and tango, the young women with their skirts almost to their knees.

What had most shocked me, during my years of campaigning, were the young people who had tried to shout us down, who did not want change. You expect complacency in older folks, not in the young. “Aren’t you satisfied with your homes, your husbands, your children? Leave politics to the men!” they had shouted.

Thank God my daughter, Jenny, had not felt that way. She had bailed me out of jail when needed, housed me often despite her husband’s antipathy toward me, and wined and dined a judge now and then when required. She had also paid in advance for my week at Lenox, so that I could rest after my traveling and marching.

“Penny,” said kindly Mr. Hardy, interrupting my thoughts.

I liked his face. It was open and somehow vulnerable. You could see that his life had not been easy, yet he was not bitter.

“I was thinking about gardens, and then about politics, and power, and men and women,” I said, but no one encouraged me to develop this conversation.

Instead, Mrs. Avery suggested we try the Ouija board. Since the war, it had become a national obsession.

“Let’s,” I agreed eagerly. “Perhaps Mr. James will come through.” He had died four years before, and I would have enjoyed a message from the master. Henry James’ letters to my dear friend Minnie had been so entertaining, and of course she had shared them, as he had meant her to do.

Mr. Hardy, grumbling a bit, went in to fetch the board as Mrs. Ballinger, Mrs. Avery, and I rearranged our chairs around a wicker table.

After we set up the board, placed the planchette in the middle, and put our fingertips on it, we waited.

And waited.

“Someone is not being open to the spirits,” said Mrs. Avery with more than a little whine in her voice. A stronger breeze stirred the treetops. Inside, the piano player tinkled his way through “Oh! How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning.”

“Maybe they don’t like the music,” suggested Mr. Hardy.

We laughed. Then the pointer moved. Just once. When we opened our eyes, it had settled over the M.

“You got your wish, Mrs. Winters,” Mrs. Ballinger told me, sounding envious. “It was to have been a message from the master.”

“Or my sister, Mary,” said Mrs. Avery. “It was, after all, my idea. It should have been a message for me.”

“For that matter, it could have been from my poodle, Mariah,” said Mrs. Ballinger.

“A useful letter, M,” agreed Mr. Hardy. “Could be anyone, anything. He pushed his chair away from the table and refused to continue. We restored our chairs to the assigned row and ignored the Ouija board.

“Nights like this, when I was a child, we told each other ghost stories to pass the time,” said Mrs. Avery. She had grown up on a farm near Rochester, and though I had known her for only a few days, I already understood that her childhood had been harder than mine. She had fled the hardscrabble farm life, and now she looked fondly back upon what she had hated at the time.

“Silly things, ghost stories,” said Mrs. Ballinger. We all turned to look at her, trying to convey the message that ghost stories were no sillier than a woman of her age wearing that shade of pink with that color hair, but Mrs. Ballinger was oblivious to such subtlety. “Silly,” she repeated with a condescending sniff. “Give me a good romance anytime.”

A car backfired just then and jolted Mr. Hardy out of his sulk.

“I saw a ghost once,” he said. “A lovely thing, all white and floating. Back when I was a boy in County Cork and almost dying of typhus.”

“That was an angel,” corrected Mrs. Avery. “I’ve never heard that ghosts are lovely.”

“It was my poor dead mother hovering over, and from what I’ve heard, she was no angel,” Mr. Hardy said.

“I’ve never heard of anyone who ever really saw a ghost,” said Mrs. Ballinger, her voice even more condescending.

“I once saw the ghost of Nero in Rome,” I said. “In Piazza del Popolo. It was all the rage that year. Anyone who was anyone saw him.”

“Rome.” Mrs. Ballinger sniffed, indicating that for some reason Rome was beyond her approval. I suspected she had never been there.

We rocked in our chairs, listening to the crickets and watching eerie, silent sheet lightning flash in the eastern sky. The crickets were very loud with their ratchety, ratchety, and the frogs in the brackish pond sounded like they were auditioning for the Anvil Chorus. Silence, human silence, was difficult that night, and I felt a need to talk. They would be voting on the amendment in Tennessee in two days, and my nerves were taut enough to be strung on a violin.

“I know someone who saw a ghost under very strange circumstances,” I said, thinking of that M and seeing in my mind’s eye a piece of stationery with that single ornate initial on it. “Shall I tell you the story?” I asked.

“Yes!” said Mr. Hardy with enthusiasm.

“Oh, Lord,” sighed Mrs. Ballinger.

“It begins in Rome,” I said.

“I’ve never been,” said Mrs. Avery. “I bet it’s lovely.”

“I’ve been many times,” I said. “Rome and Paris. London. We used to live like nomads. Newport in the spring and summer, New York in the autumn, Europe in winter. We all did, though of course such travel was new to my family, since money was new to my family. I met my husband on my first trip to Switzerland, and even after the babies came we went back every year. He insisted. ‘My dear,’ he would say, ‘you don’t mean to say you are going to buy this year’s gowns in New York rather than Paris?’ So we would pack up the children and the nurses and later the governesses and board the steamer, seeing the same faces over and over, because society was all doing it. The Lusitania, the German torpedoes when they came in 1915, ended that.”

Mr. Hardy’s mouth clamped into a straight, sad line. He had lost a son in the war.

“Well,” I continued. “The story begins in Rome, in the gardens of the Villa Borghese. Mr. Henry James wrote about them. My friend Beatrix Jones was there, touring Europe, to look at those gardens. She’s the famous garden designer. The first American woman in the field, really, and making an excellent job of it. Even her male counterparts agree on that.”

“Women just don’t know their place anymore,” grumbled Mr. Hardy. He gave me a sideways glance of disapproval. I still wore my purple, yellow, and white rosette on my cardigan, the badge of the suffragists. He, like a good many men, was worrying over that upcoming vote in Tennessee, the last state in the union to debate giving women the vote. He was not in favor.

“We will not speak of politics tonight, Mr. Hardy. We are in the Borghese gardens with Beatrix. Rome. Early spring,” I insisted.

“Oh, Lord,” repeated Mrs. Ballinger.

TWO

1895
Rome, Italy

“Is it possible to have a haunting without a sense of evil attached to it? Last night poor Mrs. Madden kept insisting she felt the presence of someone, some spirit, and instead of feeling afraid, she was comforted.” Mrs. Frederic Jones, christened Mary but known to friends and family as Minnie, frowned. Why had she brought this up? She hadn’t meant to speak of it. Everyone knew Mrs. Madden was, well, to be kind, a bit unmoored.

“I should think so,” said Mrs. Jones’ daughter, Beatrix. “It would be like—let’s see—like spring in the garden before the first seedlings are up. You can feel their presence even though you can’t see them.”

“Mr. James would disagree,” said a third woman, Edith Wharton. “I think he rather feels that this world and that other world are like Europe and America, with a vast ocean between them. Any spirit still lingering on the wrong side of the ocean must have a grievance, and a grieved spirit must have some sense of anger or wrath. Interesting concept, though, a harmless spirit. I wonder . . .” Her voice trailed off as it sometimes did when her thoughts moved from public discourse to a more private daydream. She looked pale, an indication that she had not slept well.

The little dog curled on her lap grew restive and barked to be set down. Edith held it closer.

“Nightmares again, Edith?” Minnie, her sister-in-law, rea...